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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Old Shirts & New Skins by Sherman Alexie Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Old Shirts & New Skins by Sherman Alexie Old Shirts & New Skins. Sherman Alexie's poetic power renders an honest and painful perception of contemporary Native American life. In this collection, Alexie, a poet of the Coeur d'Alene people, speaks for the spirit of Native American resistance, determination, and sovereignty, compelling readers to confront reality with his honest and inspiring vision. Remarkable in its candor and gracefully constructed, this collection of poems binds us to the present and, at the same time, connects us to the voices of the past. Old Shirts & New Skins [signed] Alexie, Sherman, illustrations by Elizabeth Woody. AbeBooks Seller Since December 14, 1997 Seller Rating. About this Item. Title: Old Shirts & New Skins [signed] Publisher: American Indian Studies, UCLA, Los Angeles. Publication Date: 1993. Binding: Paperback. Signed: Signed by Author(s) Edition: 1st Edition. About this title. Poetry. Native American Studies. Amongst the poems and prose of OLD SHIRTS & NEW SKINS appear illustrations by Elizabeth Woody, an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs, Oregon. In the best tradition of confronting American reality and exacting vision and meaning from it, Sherman Alexie chooses to use poetic power. His vision is an amazing celebration of endurance, intimacy, love, and creative insight; finally, it is a victory that can be known only by a people who refuse to submit to the thieves, liars, and killers that have made them suffer tremendous loss and pain. "Like the woman who pours her life into a stew of survival, Sherman Alexie has created a meal, not for a reader to consume but for a reader to be changed by. Survival is being documented, changes measured"—Linda Hogan. About the Author: Sherman Alexie's poems, fiction, essays and films have won him an international following since his first book, THE BUSINESS OF FANCYDANCING, was published in 1992. SMOKE SIGNALS, the film he adapted from one of his short stories and co-produced, enlarged his audience still further. Alexie's awards include the Stranger Genius Award in Literature, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards for Excellence in Children's Literature in Fiction, and the National Book Award for Young People's Literature as well as honors and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Foundation, and a citation as "One of 20 Best American Novelists Under the Age of 40" from Granta magazine. An enrolled Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, Alexie lives in Seattle with his wife and sons. "About this title" may belong to another edition of this title. All books in very good condition or better unless noted. California customers will be billed for sales tax unless a resale number is provided. Major institutions and ABAA/ILAB dealers can be invoiced upon request. All drop ships will be sent with a Bolerium return address & the ABE manifest. All books returnable for any reason within 30 days of estimated delivery date. Bolerium Books is located at 2141 Mission, Suite 300, San Francisco, CA 94110. 415-863-6353, email: [email protected]. Contact . Orders are securely packed and usually ship within 2 business days. Shipping costs are based on books weighing 2.2 LB, or 1 KG. If your book order is heavy or over sized, we may contact you to let you know extra shipping is required. Overnight shipping available upon request at additional cost. Sherman Alexie's Crazy Horse Poetry. And he is receiving proper recognition. In 1990 the Washington State Arts Commission awarded him a $5,000 Artist Fellowship Award. In 1992, the year his first great book, The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems , was published, Alexie was one of 90 writers nationwide who received a $20,000 National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship. His second book, Old Shirts & New Skins , has just been released, and a major New York publishing house will bring out a short story collection of his in the fall. All this and he turns just 27 this year. The Business of Fancydancing and Old Shirts & New Skins are companion collections, which introduce Alexie's broad skill, incandescent style and moral vision. These are Alexie's first two works, the sure foundation of a significant addition to American literature. The Business of Fancydancing: Stories and Poems by Sherman Alexie Hanging Loose Press, 1992 84 pages, $10 paperback. Through a brilliant use of interlocking characters, themes and phrases, Alexie crafts The Business of Fancydancing's 40 poems and five stories into a seamless, searing tribute to the people of the Spokane and Coeur d'Alene reservations. Alexie's writing builds upon the naked realism and ironic wonder of Blackfeet/Gros Ventre writer James Welch. In his seminal poem "Harlem, Montana: Just Off the Reservation," Welch simultaneously raged and laughed at the sorry town's whites and Indians: We need no runners here. Booze is law and all the Indians drink in the best tavern. Money is free if you're poor enough. Disgusted, busted whites are running for office in this town . Alexie adds a surrealist twist to convey comparable irony in his poem "Evolution": Buffalo Bill opens a pawn shop on the reservation right across the border from the liquor store and he stays open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. By the end of the poem, Buffalo Bill has taken "everything the Indians have to offer" and then changes the shop's sign from pawn dealer to "THE MUSEUM OF NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURES." It is not just Indian culture that is endangered, but Indians' very lives. In the story "Pawn Shop" Alexie's character wonders "where all the Skins disappeared to, and after a while, I leave, searching the streets, searching storefronts, until I walk into a pawn shop, find a single heart beating under glass, and I know who it used to belong to, I know all of them." Alexie unflinchingly documents the "halfway" existence the reservation offers. In the story "Gravity" he notes that it is to the reservation "The Indian, no matter how far he travels away, must come back, repeating, joining the reverse exodus." Yet the speaker in his poem "Native Hero" knows "I can never call the reservation home . " Then there is this recognition in "Traveling": "I wasn't there when the old Indian man from Worley said it, but I know it must be true: Every highway in the world crosses some reservation, cuts it in half." Comedy abounds, though, in the survival responses of Alexie's characters. In logic that Jorge Luis Borges would be proud of, Thomas Builds-the- Fire loses control of his daily story in "Special Delivery," the very story that has bored everyone on the reservation for 23 years. Circumstances, including a pickup driven only in reverse, a toppling utility pole, a dog named Buffalo Bill, and the politics of time, drive Thomas to hold the object of his affection, Postmistress Eve Ford, hostage for eight hours with the idea of a gun. Then there's love, if not exactly then approximately, and Alexie knows both. He can write the impudent "Reservation Love Song:" I can meet you in Springdale buy you beer & take you home in my one-eyed Ford . and the tender series of "Indian Boy Love Songs." Song #2 ends with this stanza: Indian women, forgive me. I grew up distant and always afraid. Alexie reaches his deepest and most complex emotions when the father appears in the poems and stories. In the poem "Love Hard," the speaker wants to know why, "my wild pony of a father never died, never left to chase the tail of some Crazy Horse dream?" Hookum answers. 'Your father always knew how to love hard,' you tell me, crawling over broken glass, surviving house fires and car wrecks, gather ash for your garden, Hookum, and for the old stories where the Indian never loses . In the title poem, "The Business of Fancydancing," Alexie makes striking use of the classical sestina form of Dante and the French Provencal troubadours, in which the end words are repeated in different orders through the stanzas. Alexie turns the sestina to hard-edged purposes, to cut away romanticism from the powwow dances and reveal the young men's hunger and hope. They travel with their friend who can fancydance, who is money in their pockets. "It's business, a fancydance to fill where it's empty." Old Shirts & New Skins by Sherman Alexie with illustrations by Elizabeth Woody American Indian Studies, UCLA, 1993 94 pages, $13. Old Shirts & New Skin is all poems, some prose poems, but none of the short stories that The Business of Fancydancing includes. In this second book, Alexie continues to create a Crazy Horse poetry, a poetry built of anger and imagination. Realize that the dean of the American pastoral poem, Robert Frost, described his own poetic feeling as parallel to anger. Frost said that a poem rose up in him the way animus did when he saw someone he disliked. Alexie's Crazy Horse poetry is a view of America from the grave, a grave that can't hold the dead. Crazy Horse keeps coming back to life. "How do you explain the survival of all of us who were never meant to survive?" Alexie asks in the final, crescendoing poem "Shoes." Crazy Horse stood when Custer fell; Native Americans have survived, but Alexie knows that they are just "extras" without billing in the film that is America. That distance gives pain and clarity. In "Horses," an incantatory poem our grandchildren will be reading in their school literary anthologies, Alexie measures the pain in ponies: 1,000 ponies of the Spokane Indians shot by the US Cavalry and only one survived, survived to bear a colt who won the Kentucky Derby with the stolen name, Spokane.
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